Lessons Learned From A Deadly Crash

Instead, despite sluggish acceleration, they guided their Air Florida Boeing 737 into a snowy sky, hoping to ascend into the sunshine and aim toward Tampa.

Seconds later, the twin-engine jetliner smashed down onto the 14th Street Bridge a mile north of Washington National Airport. Then it nosed into the icy Potomac River, with only its tropical green and blue tail jutting above the surface. Of the 79 on aboard, 74 died on Jan. 13, 1982.

Twenty years later, Air Florida Flight 90 is a distant memory, obscured by many other high profile crashes and the atrocities of Sept. 11.

Yet it remains one of the most notorious because of the images of survivors struggling in frigid water and of heroes attempting to rescue them -- and because of the harsh lessons it taught, mainly that copilots must speak up loudly when they sense trouble.

"It was an upstart airline with an inexperienced captain. It was busy cutting corners. It certainly was a very preventable disaster,'' said Gail Dunham, president of the National Air Disaster Alliance, a group that pushes for aviation safety improvements.

Like most airline accidents, the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 was the result of a chain of events set in motion by Murphy's Law.

The 13-year-old Boeing 737-200, referred to as "Palm 90" by air traffic controllers, was to fly from Washington to Tampa and Fort Lauderdale.

But it was snowing so hard that Wednesday the airport was temporarily shut down to allow plows to clear runways.

Delayed more than an hour, the plane left its gate about 3:25 p.m. It had been de-iced with glycol and water, but the solution wasn't as potent as it should have been.

Instead of leaving the cockpit to make a visual inspection, Capt. Larry Wheaton relied on an employee stationed inside the terminal to glance at the plane. That employee reported a "light dusting" of snow on the left wing.

But the biggest error: as they began their taxi, the pilots failed to turn on an anti-ice mechanism that would have thawed the engines and ensured proper power readings on their cockpit instruments.

Lack of power

While waiting in line for takeoff, the pilots were well aware of the snow accumulation on their wings and even made light of it.

But then they made another mistake: they pulled up close behind a New York Air DC-9, hoping its hot jet exhaust would melt away the snow on the 737's wings.

It did that. But, because it was so cold, the watery snow re-froze into ice, which then hampered the wings' ability to produce lift.

At 3:59 p.m., with First Officer Roger Petit handling the controls, the plane lined up on Runway 36, aiming north, nearly 50 minutes since it had been de-iced.

After rolling 3,500 feet, the point where the twin-engine jet should have been airborne, Petit expressed concern about the plane's lack of power.

According to the cockpit voice recorder, he said, "God, look at that thing," referring to an engine power gauge. "That don't seem right, does it?"

Because they neglected to use the engine anti-ice device, they were getting erroneous readings on their engine gauges. As a result, they had set their power to only 80 percent of what was needed for a successful takeoff.

Ironically, federal investigators would later say, the 737's Pratt & Whitney engines had plenty of reserve power. All the pilots had to do was advance the throttles to draw on it.

But they didn't, most likely because their judgment was clouded by stress.

The plane limped into the air and almost immediately lost airspeed as its nose pitched up. It began to vibrate violently.

"Stalling," one of the pilots yelled. "We're stalling."

Then, Petit cried out, "Larry, we're going down. Larry!"

An apparently resigned Wheaton responded, "I know it."

Acts of heroism

The plane first struck six cars and a truck on the 14th Street Bridge, which was bustling with rush-hour traffic. Four people on the ground were crushed to death.

Then it plunged nose first into the Potomac, blasting through a three-inch thick layer of ice.

While most of the occupants were killed on impact, five passengers and a flight attendant managed to find the surface and cling to the wreckage.

They would wallow in 34-degree water for up to 35 minutes waiting for rescuers, who needed a helicopter to pull them out because it was too dangerous to go out on the ice by foot.

It was during that agonizing time that a few heroes emerged.

With a rope around his waist, Roger Olian, a Vietnam veteran, jumped in and attempted to swim 50 yards to the survivors, pushing blocks of ice out of his way. But he became so numb that people on the shore had to reel him back in.

Lenny Skutnik, a Capitol Hill errand-runner, pulled off his cowboy boots, dove in, swam to survivor Priscilla Tirado and tugged her back to the shore. Tirado, meanwhile, would lose her baby and husband in the accident.